Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2016 i BBC Top Gear Magazine

As headline-grabbing facts for the next generation of supercars go, the numbers and tech that define the Koenigsegg Regera are mind-boggling. In fact, it’s such an extreme set of Top Trumps one-upmanship that if you’d written them down a few years ago, most in the industry would have predicted it would take decades to deliver or end in ignominious failure. “Regera”, somewhat appropriately, means “to reign” and it certainly has the firepower to justify the title – a hybrid hypercar powered by a 5.0-litre V8 and three e-motors that deliver a combined output of 1,479bhp and a tyre vaporising 1,475lb ft of torque, all of which is delivered via direct drive from the engine and will deliver a claimed top speed of 250mph. The fact that we’ve driven it just…

If you’ve been waiting patiently for an update on Cadillac’s new crossover architecture, then may we offer you some relief with news of this XT5: the first of four SUVtype things the company will sell outside of America, although in this case not in Britain, which is just as well because the XT5 – although smartly styled and roomy – feels more like a US rental, with a bouncy ride, gloopy steering and an unnecessary V6 fuelled, it would seem, by general anaesthetic. DR SPECIFICATION…

MAZDA MX-5 MkIV Engine: 1988cc, 4cyl, 158bhp @ 6000rpm, 147lb ft @ 4600rpm Performance: 0–62mph in 7.3secs, 133mph Transmission: 6spd manual, RWD Economy: 40.9mpg, 161g/km CO2 Weight: 1075kg L x W: 3915mm x 1735mm In April this year, the millionth MX-5 was born at Mazda’s Hiroshima plant; much fanfare and bowing ensued. And who would deny Mazda a bow, because to sell 1,000,000 cars over 26 years and four generations might sound pitiful compared to a similarly seasoned family hatch, but for a two-seater convertible, it’s a miraculous level of success. The MX-5 doesn’t just take the lion’s share of the rather bijou roadster market, it is the roadster market. As with so many things in life, the key is simplicity. It is a handsome, lightweight thing that’s simple to operate…

#05 1972 Chevy C10R What is this? This C10R Chevy truck is what happens when a pro-touring racer asks his pro-touring racer girlfriend – now wife – if she’d rather have a wedding or a race truck. No contest, the truck every time. Rob Phillips had originally designed the truck – described as what happens when you cross a Chevy C10 with a Pagani Zonda – for himself. But then it became his wife Brandy’s, after he got down on one knee and she needed a new racer. Why this truck? To qualify for Goodguys Rod & Custom autocross events, the couple had to run a pre 1973 vehicle. They settled on the C10 as Rob had so many parts left over from his own C10. Plus it acted as…

Pay attention at the back In the TopGear dictionary, Vmax refers to a car’s top whack – the point at which it can go no faster. When talking about enzyme kinetics, however – and we’ve all been there – it refers to the maximum rate at which an enzyme is catalysed in a reaction, which occurs when all active sites are saturated with substrate. None of which is as interesting as doing 200mph on an autobahn as your bottom grips the seat with surprising tenacity. WHISK ASSESSMENT At a recent event in the Philippines, kitchen toolmonger Kenwood turned one of its baking mixers into a makeshift winch, which then pulled a Mini Clubman full of people. Thanks to the mixer’s 1,500W motor, the stunt was a success, car magazines suddenly…

FORD NUCLEON There are many reasons the Ford Nucleon never caught on –but the biggest one is probably that the technology required to build it (a nuclear reactor small, light, stable and safe enough to power a car) doesn’t really exist. Even now, 60 years on. MERCEDES AIR BALANCE PACKAGE Usually it take years for a car to develop that special whiff-not so some Mercs, which can be had with fragrance dispensers that pipe special scents into their leather- lined cabins. If this isn’t luxury, we’re not sure what is. SINCLAIR C5 A lot of people think the Sinclair C5 was simply ahead of its time. Many other think it was just terrible. Essentially a battery-assisted tricycle, it was expensive, slow, quite dangerous and especially embarrassing to be seen on.…

Even the mighty Michael Schumacher had to start somewhere. His F1 breakthrough came 25 years ago on 25 August 1991 at the Belgian Grand Prix, and the man who gave him his shot? TG’s own Eddie Jordan: “Picture this. Arriving in Belgium we had a driver – Bertrand Gachot – in jail, next to no money and our cars had been impounded by a local judge over an unpaid bill. On top of that, the Belgian press were going crazy because they believed I hadn’t done enough to support the legal case of their man, plus I’d replaced him with a completely unknown driver whose name they couldn’t even spell. It wasn’t looking good. “Had it not been for Bernie, who lent us the money to get the cars back,…

You might think you know your car, but how well does your car know you? It’s happening. BMW is first out of the blocks, launching this month something called BMW Connected. They call it a cloud-based ‘digital companion’. Hmmm. I’m not sure I want a binary buddy. My companions are human. It all seems a bit creepy to me. BMW Connected is a free extension to the satnav system that became standard in all UK BMWs from January this year – that’s 400,000 cars already. It wirelessly links your car and their cloud and your phone (iPhone only, so far). The phone app and the cloud between them sniff around your diary, emails, address book and your car’s nav system. Among other places. Then Connected tries to make sense of…

Doesn’t look much like a Nissan, does it? The BladeGlider looks more like a mishmash of a Shinkansen bullet train, the SR-71 Blackbird, and something else that escapes me at the moment. Anyway, I want to draw your attention to the reversing light. In a rear shamelessly riffing on BMW’s i8, it’s significant. It’s a spare from Williams’ current F1 car, and the tip of a British bloody-mindedness iceberg that’s brought Nissan’s vision of a next-generation sports car into being. It’s Williams Advanced Engineering that has animated the BladeGlider as you see it here, sizzling in the 35°C glare of a Brazilian winter. In fairness, Nissan’s been gamely experimenting with rocket-shaped fast cars – originally intended as an Indy Car design proposal – for a good while beforehand. First there…

I t’s hard for turbocharged engines to feel special, to have charisma, when by their very nature they can’t offer the same noise, response and high-rev drama. And that’s what we like about engines – the combination of our senses being spiked matched to drivability, both pulling in the same direction. Conversely, it’s when turbos have holes in their drivability that they tend to be more exciting. I drove a 1995 Audi RS2 recently. If you wanted to come out of the corner quickly, you had to accelerate before you turned in, then hold on tight and pray you got the timing right. It made me plan and concentrate, whereas the latest crop is designed to be as easy to use as possible. Maybe that’s where we’re going wrong –…

Price/as tested £134,520/£150,720 Model V10 Plus Driver Ollie Marriage Why it’s here Is Audi’s everyday supercar still special to live with? 5204cc, V10, 4WD, 602bhp, 413lb ft 23.0mpg, 287g/km CO2 0–62mph in 3.2secs, 205mph 1454kg REPORT 3 I don’t think the R8 has had the opportunity to draw breath since it arrived. I’ve worked out that on separate occasions it’s visited Yorkshire, Essex, Shropshire and, for the purposes of this report, Glasgow. All of those in the hands of colleagues. I need to do my own road trip in it… Anyway, colleague Stuart Fennimore nabbed it for ten days to appear at the Ignition Festival in Glasgow. Quite why he needed it for ten days for a two-day appearance I think we can all guess – the R8 is that…

A fter six months and 7,000 miles, it is time for the TG Garage MX-5 to depart, and I am bereft. I feel as if I have lost, well, if not quite a leg, then at least a less vital body part: a big toenail, perhaps. A long-standing mole. It may not be groundbreaking or fre-breathing, but the MX-5 is, quite simply, the perfect car for British summertime: an uncomplicated two-seater that veritably encourages you to drop the roof at every opportunity, and head of for a quick squirt down your nearest bendy road. It’s also the last of a dying breed: the naturally aspirated, rear-drive roadster. With even Porsche’s Boxster now shamelessly embracing turbocharging, what’s out there for under, say, £40k? Nissan 370Z cabrio? Do they still make that?…

Price/as tested £32,260/£39,460 Model Titanium Sport Driver Andy Franklin Why it’s here Is the S-Max still the answer for families? 1999cc, 4cyl TD, FWD, 210bhp, 332lb ft 51.4mpg, 144g/km CO2 0–62mph in 8.8secs, 135mph 1766kg REPORT 6 Bags? Check! Passports? Check! Tyres? Unchecked! Arrghhh! Just before leaving on my 1,800 mile round-trip summer holiday to France, I had a mild man panic after I realised I still had winter tyres on. It had completely slipped my mind due to the very mild and wet weather we’ve had this year. With temperatures exceeding 37°C most days in the south of France, I figured I’d be shredding tyres as quickly as Edward Scissorhands cuts grass. A quick dash to get them swapped, a dent of £724 to the wallet, and I was…

HEAD TO HEAD Blue bloods BMW M2 £44,080 Porsche 718 Cayman S £48,834 CAYMAN MEETS M2 IN A BATTLE TO DECIDE WHICH BLUE IS BEST Miami Blue or Long Beach Blue? Personally I’d have Long Beach. It’s a bit deeper and richer than the powdery, consciously retro Miami, which looks a bit like the lacquer has started to wear away. Naming paintwork after sunny, lively US coastal cities is a marketing gimmick designed to make you think romantic thoughts while sat in front of a car configurator at a dull desk on a grimy industrial estate on a drizzly day – to take you to a place you dream of, in the car you dream of. And we do dream. We hope and imagine, too. Because in our idle moments,…

WE SAY: TWO SUVS THAT DODGE CO2 TAX, BUT WHICH IS REALLY BETTER? Green SUV? Tackling the impossible? The Audi Q7 e-tron is a plug-in hybrid. It claims a test range of over 30 miles on electric alone, and a real 20 is possible. The electric motor sits between a 3.0-litre V6 diesel and the eight-speed auto, so both power units drive all wheels. Volvo’s XC90 T8 is also a PHEV, but differently configured. A four-cylinder petrol drives the front wheels, an electric motor the rears. Its battery has only half the Audi’s capacity, so pure electric range is only a real-world 11 miles or so. Do they do what’s promised? In EV mode, the Audi gets along well. As with the XC90, it emphasises electric energy if you have…

NEW METAL Top of the class EVERYONE GETS NERVOUS ABOUT EXAM RESULTS, BUT ZAGATO NEEDN’T HAVE WORRIED WITH THE ASTON VANQUISH VOLANTE Zagato’s products are famed for their double-bubble roofs. Well, here’s one that eschews that, using a folding fabric top instead. Following the sell-out run of 99 Aston Martin Vanquish Zagatos (despite the car’s £500,000 pricetag), the companies have linked up to extend the run by another 99 cars, this second lot significantly more open-air. Like the hard top, the Volante uses a 592bhp 6.0-litre V12 engine, firmly from Aston’s old-school rather than its renaissance, led by the new turbocharged DB11. This Zagato is good for a 3.7-second 0–62mph time, while its top speed should be a whisker shy of 200mph. Beyond the tin-opener treatment, the styling is unchanged.…

Whatever you drive, if your car was new in the past 10 years, the chances are it could be performing under pressures that are almost twice as high as they would have been a decade ago. Car manufacturers continue to design and build engines that simultaneously get smaller and more efficient but also increasingly powerful. And this means the oil in those engines needs to withstand ever more extreme pressures, often in excess of 10,000kg per square centimetre. And if it’s an engine in a supercar, the stakes are raised ever higher. Oil is the only engineering component that touches all other moving parts in any engine, and when cars produce the sort of power that the world’s leading supercars produce, that oil needs to be incredibly strong. Strong like…

Tractor. Oh God. He hasn’t seen us. We’re sideways at 60mph and a tractor has lumbered onto the runway. How hasn’t he seen us? Before I’ve time to make the Team America Secret Signal, champion Irish drifter Darren McNamara has braked, downshifted about 40 times and given the tractor’s bemused driver the international Irish hand signal for “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I’m beside him in a one-of Nissan GT-R with no front driveshafts, no paddles, barely any interior and nitrous. This is the rear-drive, widebody, 1,390bhp Nissan GT-R Spec-D Edition, built for one heroically silly purpose. To eviscerate the world’s fastest drift goalposts. In April, this very car was flown to Fujairah International Airport’s 1.8-mile runway (it still wears the number plates allowing it to be…

“Ballistic” BJ Baldwin is a Trophy Trucker who once blew of his own fingertip after a shoot – it was actually only supposed to be a photographic one – with this very magazine. Perhaps that’s why the standard-ft Browning .30 has been removed from his latest toy and replaced by a harmless grappling hook attached to a winch. That should keep those annoying health and safety people of his case, eh? Anyway, the car. It’s called the Ferret and it’s based on an old armoured vehicle of the same name. Made by Daimler (of posh Jag fame) in the Fifties, it was originally used by the British Army for recon and scouting jobs, and powered by a Rolls-Royce straightsix. Production officially ended in 1971, but amazingly it’s still used by…

Even 60-year-old cars can make history. We’re well into auction silly season now, and this pair of buxom blue dream machines has destroyed the form book for classic-car auction sales. Above, you’re ogling the 1956 Ecurie Ecosse team Jaguar D-type, which won the 24 Hours of Le Mans outright that year. As pedigree goes, that’s the Willy Wonka golden ticket. As is the condition, which is smart enough to eat your quail egg supper of. And so, after a frantic fourway bidding war at the RM Sotheby’s auction in Pebble Beach, the Ecurie car’s hammer fell at a dizzying $21,780,000. That’s £16.5m in sterling, and makes the LM-winning D-type the most pricey British car ever auctioned. Of course, the Americans had to do their best to show up the Brit,…

DJI PHANTOM 4 The Phantom is one of the most popular and user-friendly drones-with-an-onboard-camera you can buy. This is the new one, and it’s in the pages of TopGear for two reasons. One, it now has a tracking feature, which fixes like a missile lock to a moving target – ie a car – and follows it, flying above and behind while capturing soaring, gimbal-steady shots with its ultra-HD video cam. Two, there’s now a Sport setting, which lets it buzz along at 45mph. So it could be used to film a car up a winding road. At these speeds the autopilot and collision-avoidance modes are deactivated, so be careful you don’t fly into the back of a pedestrian’s head. £1,229; store.dji.com NERF TERRASCOUT The problem with regular Nerf blasters…

1941 WILLYS JEEP SO WHERE DID IT ALL BEGIN? Well, in 1940 the American military invited 135 manufacturers to bid for the right to supply a new “light reconnaissance vehicle”. As you can imagine, the specifications were extensive, perhaps the most important of which was that two men had to be able to carry the thing. This daunting call was answered by three manufacturers, including Willys-Overland. Following some record-time prototype production, the army soon had itself a choice between three models. By the summer of 1940, the army was in possession of 70 sample vehicles of each prototype. It was, however, the Willys Quad that was selected to become the army’s general purpose vehicle of choice in 1941. Months of exhaustive testing and modification later, the willys Quad became the…

Once upon a time, a connected car meant one with a wireless radio and a clunky car phone. Then came Bluetooth, satnav and smartphones, and suddenly we had hands-free calls, live mapping, music streaming and all sorts. These days – like it or not – a car can be marketed as much for its digital kudos as the way it goes around a corner. Until now, much of this tech has been based around a GPS or 4G connection. But in a world of wifi and the Internet of Things, cars will soon become more connected than ever. Here are six things your car will talk to in the not-too-distant future… 1 Other cars Vehicle-to-vehicle networking, or V2V, is getting closer to reality. Broadly speaking, the technology is based on…

For a car company that has yet to make a car, Faraday Future is expanding at a faintly unsettling rate. We’d barely heard of this Chinese-backed, Americanbased startup before January’s CES show, where it showed a prototype – it was really just a shell – of an all-electric, single-seater supercar called the FFZERO1. And yet in just two years, the company has built a staff of 900 people; most from Silicon Valley and the tech world, though many have made the pilgrimage from more traditional car companies such as BMW, Jaguar, Lotus and Ford. Just this month, Faraday appointed former Ferrari F1 boss Marco Mattiacci as its global brand & commercial officer. In other words, it means business, although right now, a business is all it has. Groundwork has started…

TopGear doesn’t do infrastructure (unless we’re complaining about traffic or potholes), but we’ve made an exception because as cars get cleverer and cleverer, so too must the roadways that support and enable them, and the mass transit systems that operate alongside them. Take the Mercedes Future Bus, with its semiautonomous CityPilot mode that enables it to accelerate, brake and negotiate junctions without interference from its driver. The Future Bus might look a bit Tron, but with it Mercedes raises an important point – how expanding, already gridlocked cities can cope with hundreds of thousands more inhabitants. Merc tested the FB on something called a Bus Rapid Transit Line, a kind of bus-only superhighway that works because it recognises and addresses the issues buses present when they’re mixed with regular traffic.…

Will teaching a car to drive itself off-road be easier than setting up an on-road autopilot? On the face of it, yes: no oncoming traffic and a negligible likelihood of errant pedestrians. What it will need to recognise are tiny changes in surface, keeping the 4WD system optimised for what you’re clambering over, taking into account any slopes, your speed and even the weather. Not so simple after all. As you’d expect, it’s Land Rover forging ahead, with TBSA – terrain-based speed adaption. Forward-facing cameras identify obstacles, and can tell the difference between trees, ruts, rocks and even standing water. Our prototype charges along a dirt track, then casually brakes as it plunges through a water splash, maintaining momentum. Once Land Rover gets the system to talk to its Surface…

K oenigsegg has a vision of the future. In it, 1,500bhp hypercars have cloaking devices. They’re not only massively effective, rendering the car utterly invisible, but also activate almost instantaneously. Ingeniously, the system is linked to throttle position. So, say you’re being pursued through a dystopian city by a rampaging gang of social-media supercar baggers, all you have to do is briskly take the throttle to ooh, about 30 per cent, a puffy white cloud appears and all they’re showing on Periscope is the inside of that thick, choking cloud while, somewhere of in the distance, a plainly furious T rex is bellowing in pursuit of a hapless triceratops. I have never experienced anything that bonfires its tyres like the Koenigsegg Regera. Anything. Despite the best tractive efforts of the…

I n a way, it’s surprising Honda held out for so long. When the red Civic Type-R you see here was launched back in 2007, most of its rivals were already turbocharged. Take the MkV Volkswagen Golf GTI. It had the same power as the 198bhp Civic, but over 60lb ft more than the 142lb ft the Honda could muster, delivered almost 4,000rpm further down the rev range. Unsurprisingly the Civic, with its engine largely carried over from the 2001 EP3 Type-R, was criticised for being of the pace. But Honda held out, trusting in VTEC and high revs to do the business. And to a certain extent it did – and still does today. This naturally aspirated 2.0-litre is sharp and tingly. With intake and outflow of gases unimpeded,…

V is for Virtual car “Unless you were there, you’d have no idea the car you are seeing was fiction, not fact” Still confused? Want to see exactly what the Blackbird is capable of? Then head to topgear.com to see Pat Devereux presenting an astonishing clip, created especially for us. Sorry, Pat, but the car’s the star in this one Imagine a car that can change its size and shape to become any other car you want it to be. One that can be tuned to replicate the performance – the power delivery curve, the gearshift points – and suspension characteristics of the car you’ve chosen that day. So it will ride, turn and go just like the car you want it to be. A vehicle so well thought-out, it…

WE SAY:RENAULT’S LATEST FAST HATCH TRIES SOMETHING A BIT DIFFERENT If anyone knows how to make a good hot hatch, it’s Renault. Only last month we drove the Clio RS16, a joyous thing stripped of mod cons. This Megane GT, though, is different, a fast hatchback with technology aplenty. Most notably a 7spd paddleshift gearbox and a four-wheelsteering system named 4 Control, which works much like a 911 GT3 or AMG GT R’s set-up: at lower speeds, it turns the rear wheels in the opposite direction to the fronts, to sharpen responses. Above 50mph, all four wheels point the same way, upping stability. Our first acquaintance with this GT was on sweeping Portuguese tarmac, where it felt well judged; on brisk roads, there’s tons of traction and it’s effortless to…

BMW 740e iPerformance £68,330 WE SAY: DOWNSIZE-HAPPY ÜBER-BARGE GETS GREAT NUMBERS ON PAPER, BUT YOU’LL HAVE TO PLAY TO ITS STRENGTHS OUT IN THE REAL WORLD Yes, it’s a 2.0-litre limousine, but if that offends you, consider this the halfway house between a luxo-barge and a BMW i8. This isn’t your of-the-shelf four-banger. It’s actually BMW’s most powerful, at 258bhp. Between the flywheel and the eight-speed auto is a fat, disc-shaped electric motor, so the total system power is 322bhp. The electric motor drives through the 740e’s gearbox, which means its full power is available right across the speed range, rather than falling of as speed rises. The engine always operates with the motor, but there’s a clutch between the two, so the motor can drive the car with the…

Caterham Seven 310R £24,995 WE SAY: THE MOST ROUNDED SEVEN, IF SUCH A PARADOX COULD EXIST... For such a simple car, the Seven range is becoming an awfully complex thing. But thanks to this new 310, the picking process has been made a bit easier. It’s a Caterham that does Caterhaming in the most Caterhamy way possible and is a strong contender for the default choice for petrolheads. Initially, it was destined to be just an engine upgrade. But the head honchos found an uprated 270 held a candle to the much-loved, Rover-powered Superlight R300 of old (a bit of a peach and TG fave), so decided to make a new model entirely. The 310 sandwiches itself into the super sweet spot between the 270 and 360 thanks to some…

...Skoda Kodiaq 1 It’s big Skodas are good at this – just ask the Superb estate, but even that is thwarted by the Kodiaq’s 2,065-litre boot, with the two rearmost rows folded down. In five-seat configuration, there’s still 720 litres and even with all seven seats up (seats six and seven are optional) there’s 270 litres. This being a Skoda, that space is particularly well thought out, so the second row can slide and tilt individually, while 104mm of legroom in the second row is vast. 2 It’s clever The focus of the interior is a slick, glass-covered touchscreen that debuts a new hi-res infotainment system capable of all sorts of smartphone mirroring and wifi-enabling functions, but most importantly, it looks great. Engine options are all turbo, all four-cylinder and…

First impression are everything, aren’t they? It doesn’t matter what follows, there is only ever that one occasion when we experience ‘that thing’ for the first time. Four days in Iceland with Hyundai’s latest top-of-the-range SUV-the Santa Fe-delivered enough of those first to last a lifetime. Firs up, if you’ve lived half your life in and around London or the south east of England, it’s impossible not to notice the immense sense of space Iceland offers. Frankly, it’s apparent the moment you walk out of the airport in Reykjavik, Iceland’s alt-cool capital (and, practically, only) city. As in the UK, Iceland is nearing the end of its summer just now and, despite the pleasantly warm, sunny weather, that stunningly clear Icelandic air still carries a reminder that proper, extreme weather…

Just look at it. It’s more like a shed skin than a complete car, as if the underpinnings have bolted and left nothing but a top surface, body panels attached to thin air. It’s all about air, of course. We’ve seen venturis, we’ve seen splitters, wings, ducts and flicks, but never in the field of automotive experience have we seen anything like the AM-RB 001. “Aerodynamics is the main performance diferentiator,” Adrian Newey tells us, and no one is in the least surprised. We were promised it would be able to deliver LMP1 pace; now we can see how, the air squeezed, sucked, blown, twisted and directed like never before. This does lead to another question. Why do we need downforce on road cars? This isn’t a road car really,…

Early next year, on city circuits around the world, 10 cars – each roughly the size of a Mercedes S-Class – will do battle in a way we’ve never seen before. Well, not unless you’ve seen an entire grid of fully electric, driverless machines snake around foodlit streets and maybe even drive upside-down through tunnels to a bass-heavy soundtrack played to spectators around the track. It’s called RoboRace, and the cars have been designed by TG’s favourite futurist Daniel Simon – the man behind the fantastical Cosmic Motors and the vehicles from Disney’s Tron: Legacy. But although we’ve fled them under D, you can’t really call them drones – that would suggest they’re remote-controlled. They’re not. They might be programmed to behave in a certain way, but ultimately they think…

The latest Google car isn’t just a normal car with a driverless mode. It’s a fully autonomous pod that does away with the steering wheel altogether. All you have to do is sit there, looking nervous, while it takes care of steering, navigation and – with a bit of luck – stopping at red lights. The thing on the roof is not a flashing light from a Seventies cop car, but rather a lidar unit. Like sonar and radar, lidar (light detection and ranging) is the detection of objects using a signal’s “time of flight”. A rangefinder emits a laser pulse, then uses the time taken for it to bounce back to calculate the distance of an object from the source of the pulse. When combined with highly accurate mapping…

Earlier this year, Aston Martin announced a joint venture (JV) with Chinese consumer electronics company LeEco. “It brings Aston Martin’s electric car project forward,” CEO Andy Palmer observed. By about 20 years… JVs bring down the vast cost involved in developing a new car. They also reduce the risk. Technologies like fuel cells benefit from the pooled R&D resources of major automotive OEMs. They’re legally tricky, too. But they’re also sometimes the only way the cars we love stand a fighting chance of being made at all. The juiciest upcoming JV is the deal BMW and Toyota have struck to create a new sports car. Scalable platform architecture means the new Z5 and Supra will not be direct rivals. The Z5 will be a roadster, underpinned by BMW’s rapidly evolving…

Audi’s technik has never been quite so vorsprung. How does a moon-shot sound? The Google Lunar XPRIZE is a challenge to develop accessible “methods of robotic space exploration” that is being contested by 16 teams. One of the finalists is the Part-Time Scientists, a 35-strong, Berlin-based group currently developing a lunar rover with the aim of being on board a moon-mission launch vehicle in late 2017. “Ultimately,” CEO Robert Böhme says, “space exploration should be available to everyone. Ordinary people like you and I should be able to live there. Spacecraft should be like cars – you should be able to get from A to B in them…” Audi’s Munich design guys have helped refine the look of PTS’s lunar rover (think cute ultra hi-tech hostess trolley), and the company’s…

T he common belief is that firms have been forced to adopt turbocharging due to emissions and wanting to improve economy. By and large that’s true. Only with the proviso that the benefits seen on the EU fuel cycle, which tests cars so gently that the turbo almost never wakes up, aren’t then matched by the reality. However, there’s another reason: power. When I went on the launch of the new, turbo Porsche 911, one of the engineers openly told me that if they didn’t turn to turbos, they wouldn’t be able to match the power figures of their rivals. Forget noise, lag and all the rest, it’s the headline figures of speed and economy that sell cars and at least until the official tests get a makeover, turbo cars…

“A Lidar laser scanner maps the environment at 700k points per second”…

I’ve been waiting for years to write an earnest review of a caravan. But until I land my dream job at a serious motoring publication (my CV is available upon request), I must speak to you via the medium of TG. So, in the meantime, let’s talk about the white thing attached to the back of my CX-3, shall we? With any luck, you’ll even read this report to the very end, where I shall reveal a slightly embarrassing secret. I know what you’re thinking. A caravan, in the custody of TopGear, with our reputation? By rights it should explode, catch fre, accidentally fall over a cliff or be towed at speed until it disintegrates. After all, it has been our ongoing mission to remove as many caravans from this…

Price £28,155/£29,920 Model GTi 270 Driver Ollie Kew Why it’s here Does Peugeot’s first family hot hatch in two decades cut la moutarde? 1598cc, 4cyl turbo, FWD, 266bhp, 243lb ft 47.0mpg, 139g/km CO2 0–62mph in 6.0secs, 155mph 1205kg REPORT 4 From day one, a single figure has jumped of the Peugeot’s spec sheet, begging for attention. Not the specific output of 166bhp per litre, although you’ve got to applaud Peugeot’s powertrain alchemists for extracting similar power density to a McLaren 650S. It’s the weight: a claimed 1,205kg ready to drive. For a five-door hatchback, made mostly from steel and loaded with equipment, that’s an extraordinary claim. VW took 100kg out of the Golf GTI with the current version, but the claimed kerbweight for a fve-door manual is still 146kg heavier…

Price £32,995/£39,995 Model E10 S Driver Jack Rix Why it’s here Is this the most liveable lightweight you can currently buy? 1999cc turbo 4cyl, RWD, 247bhp, 295lb ft 38.5mpg, 190g/km CO2 0–62mph in 4.0secs, 145mph 850kg REPORT 2 Barely a few weeks into Zenos ‘ownership’ and already our car has been back to the factory. But fear not, this was all in the name of power. Zenos is now offering owners and prospective customers the chance to put more hair on the chest of their 247bhp E10 S. It requires just a laptop but increases power by 30bhp and torque by 20lb ft. There are no official performance figures for the upgrade (we’ll strap the timing gear on ourselves as soon as possible) but a sub 4.0secs 0–62mph is feasible.…